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Saturday, 27 February 2016

The View From My Desk by Janie Hampton

The view south from my desk

When I finished writing the biography of
Joyce Grenfell, my mind was overflowing with facts, dates and details. I needed
to do something practical, an activity that required a different kind of
concentration. Not being much good at carpentry, constructing a fitted desk
seemed an ideal way of expunging three years’ research. The perfect place to
put it was in the corner of my first-floor study between two windows: one
facing south, the other west. My skills
were stretched and my brain emptied as I sawed, drilled and screwed my new desk,
complete with a sliding shelf for my keyboard.

On the shelves above my computer are the
books I might want instantly – addresses, diary, dictionary, and some I just
like looking at, such as 14 volumes of Chamber’s Encyclopaedia. Two other walls
are filled with shelves crammed tight with books and on the floor are piles of
papers, always waiting to be sorted. A few years ago, when the shelves
overflowed and the piles began to topple, I designed a staggered staircase up
to the attic and filled it with more bookshelves. They soon filled up too.

Looking out of the South window, I decided it
needed to be extended into a full-length window. The construction of that was a
severe test of my marriage. The sliding window arrived in many unlabelled pieces,
with instructions translated from Chinese. ‘Make the several parts (B) to commit
inwards besides themselves(Y).’ By
committing ourselves to extreme patience, both the window and the marriage held
firm.

The new window looks over the back garden, in
summer a jumble of artichokes, raspberries and rambling roses. Skittling
between the vegetable beds are our moving flowers –coloured Peking, Frizzle and
Mille-fleur bantams. The Indian runner ducks compete with robins and blackbirds
for grubs in the soil.

Moving flowers, or bantams.

View of my desk (top left)

In spring, the view is filled with a blaze of
bridal white pear and blushing pink apple blossom, followed by the intense blue
of wisteria cascading over a self-seeded ash tree. In the winter, beyond the
tangle of oak and silver birch branches, I can see Temple Cowley Pool. Many a
paragraph was untangled in my mind as I swam up and down the slow lane. But that’s history now: the pool has closed, soon to be replaced with
flats.

To the left is the tower of St Luke’s Church.
When it was built by Lord Nuffield in 1938, the workers of his Morris Motors
factory threatened to go on strike. ‘If you can afford to build a church, you
can pay us more.’ So he paid them more. But by 1999, the factory had declined from over 20,000 workers to a few robots
and the church had become redundant. My oak
kitchen table was the altar which I rescued from a pile of rubble during the
building’s renovation as the Oxfordshire History Centre. It’s a
quiet place to research local history, where I discovered that my house was
built in 1929, and belonged to a vet called Mr Snodgrass.

Through the West window I can see squirrels
leaping through a beech tree, wheeling red kites, down Cowley hill to the
dreaming spires, and beyond the city to Boar’s Hill.

Looking West to Oxford's 'dreaming spires'.

The wall opposite has a large whiteboard with
scribbled ideas, lists and reminders. Many of these have spilled onto the
surrounding glass-framed drawings of a Norfolk lane, a Russian monastery and
the 1908 Olympics. In the afternoon, a myriad of ‘camera obscura’ images of the
sun, formed in the tiny gaps between the leaves, appear dancing on the wall.

Husband and grandchildren waiting in the view.

As the sun sets, I spot my husband wandering
down the garden to the bay tree, carrying a bottle of wine and two glasses. It
is time to leave my desk and join him in the view.

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